Politico to Obama: Feel Free to Keep Lying About Romney's Outsourcing

Over the past four years, since the rise of these insidious media fact-checkers, we’ve seen it a hundred times.

1. A Republican launches a potent and perfectly fair criticism of a Democrat.

2. Fearing this criticism will evolve into a damaging narrative against the Democrat, a panicked and dishonest media fact-checker comes along and finds a way to declare the criticism as false or mostly false or just false enough to protect the Democrat.

3. The media then uses this phony fact check to kill the emerging narrative and makes sure it gains no traction.

4. Then the media will sometimes take it a step further and use the phony fact check as a way to turn the perfectly valid criticism of the Democrat into a weapon against the Republican by questioning his character and integrity.

This is the reason why these fact checkers were invented by the media. It allows them to craft a bludgeon called “objective truth” and beat us silly with it. Except that nine times out of ten, that bludgeon has been crafted with parsing, rationalizing, and lies of omission.

Well, now we have a fascinating test case before us.

1. FactCheck.org has found that the Obama campaign’s ads declaring Romney an outsourcer-in-chief are completely false.

2. Even the corrupt Washington Post, the media outlet the Obama campaign is using as its source for the dishonest claim, has said the ads are false.

And…

3. Suddenly the media, specifically the corrupt Politico, will not be making a politician pay a price for continuing to lie about his opponent even after the facts have become clear.

The whole FactCheck.org/Politifact/Glenn Kessler approach to covering the campaign has its uses, but one of the limitations is that it often blurs the difference between standard-issue political rhetoric and brazen, obvious distortion of the facts. Right now, the Obama campaign is casting undisputed facts of Romney’s records (Bain assets created jobs overseas and also cut jobs in the U.S.) in a very negative light (it created foreign jobs at the cost of the U.S. economy.) Romney’s response so far has been to try and discredit the whole line of attack as false and “vicious,” without really getting into the weeds of what it means to lead a major financial firm with a complex web of foreign entanglements.

Right now, the Obama campaign is casting undisputed facts of Romney’s records (Bain assets created jobs overseas and also cut jobs in the U.S.) in a very negative light (it created foreign jobs at the cost of the U.S. economy.)

What Burns doesn’t tell you, though, is that no outsourcing occurred at Bain under Romney’s leadership. So now you have both the media and the Obama campaign teaming together to blame Romney for what Bain did after he left the company.

That would be like blaming Edward R. Murrow for RatherGate. Well, hell, it’s all CBS News!

And yet the facts are pretty clear here, aren’t they?

Romney did not outsource jobs.

Obama is lying and saying he did.

And the corrupt media intends to let him continue to lie and to aid and abet that lying, including Politico and the Washington Post.